Books & Poetry

After writing about a notorious nineteenth-century murder in ‘The Italian Boy’, Wise has turned her attention to a notorious nineteenth-century slum. The Old Nichol was a Bethnal Green...

Does your ten-year-old know the difference between stocks and bonds? There are plenty of children’s books on nutrition, sex, getting better grades, making friends or standing up to bullies,...

Patience Agbabi has always written edgy poems that dance off the page. Unafraid and unapologetic, she depicts issues of race, gender and sexuality with sensory imagery underscored by a deeply felt...

‘When I was 13, my father killed my mother.’ From this opening bombshell, Charles Lambert’s debut novel, set in post-war Britain, is compelling. Following the violent act that...

The illustrations scattered through Kitty Hauser’s new book are not the family snaps one expects to find in a biography. An ordinary patterned carpet is shown from two angles. An aerial shot...

Adam Thorpe’s new novel could be read as a companion piece to his last, ‘Between Each Breath’. Both take a scalpel to middle-class smugness via an unsettling encounter with...

It’s day tripping season – but where to go? A bit of advance planning always pays off and in ‘Adventure Walks for Families in and Around London’, Becky Jones and Clare Lewis...

Kathy Acker ended one of her novels: ‘One day, maybe, there’d be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust.’ ‘Friction’...

Alexandra Fuller was born in England, grew up in southern Africa and now lives in Wyoming. Her first books drew on the middle phase of her life; this, her third, is a non-fiction tale anchored in...

Lady Idina Sackville was the daughter of Earl De La Warr who romped through the shredded social scene of London after the Great War and straight into the high jinx of Kenya’s Happy Valley...